Director Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” film series is the sixth most-successful franchise in U.S. box-office history after the “Marvel Universe,” “Harry Potter,” “Star Wars,” “James Bond” and “Batman” franchises. If The Hobbit: the Battle of the Five Armies, the latest installment in the series, proves successful, Jackson’s six ambitious films could catapult to No. 2 on this list.
But one marketing conundrum residents of Middle Earth will face in promoting Battle of the Five Armies is selecting which networks to buy time on to reach fans. Each month, TiVo Research asks its TiVo Advisers Panel which movies they saw in the theater and matches that information to passive second-by-second viewing data. Listed at right are the top 10 cable networks for subscribers who saw the franchise’s previous installment, 2013’s The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, in theaters and their respective indices for the primetime daypart.
